Month: August 2012

Science Left Behind

if you thought the right wing has a monopoly on it’s attack on science, i have news for you. the vaccination causes autism assholes are a good example.

To listen to most pundits and political writers, evolution, stem cells, and climate change are the only scientific issues worth mentioning—and the only people who are anti-science are conservatives. Yet those on the left have numerous fallacies of their own. Aversion to clean energy programs, basic biological research, and even life-saving vaccines come naturally to many progressives. These are positions supported by little more than junk-science and paranoid thinking.

free pussy riot

Shutter sound

Camera Phone Predator Alert Act – Requires any mobile phone containing a digital camera to sound a tone whenever a photograph is taken with the camera’s phone

fuck you, japan and korea, for making camera sounds mandatory worldwide. and of course, the usual think of the children nonsense in the US isn’t far behind.

Finland after Nokia

Finland is coping with Nokia’s demise by having a phone throwing competition.

The World Mobile Phone Throwing Championship took place yesterday in the small town of Savonlinna, Finland. In this international, no-holds-barred competition, people from across the globe throw phones as far as possible to win the sought-after grand prize – a new phone.

2.5 ka Tattoos

jersey shore-style tribal tattoos actually 2.5 ka old.

Tattoos were used as a mean of personal identification – like a passport now, if you like. The Pazyryks also believed the tattoos would be helpful in another life, making it easy for the people of the same family and culture to find each other after death

College counseling

College counseling remains garbage. apparently colleges now make you go through counseling when you get a student loan to explain to you that you will owe money at the end of your degree. it’s unclear whether they also tell you that with the job prospects of your degree, it will take 3 lifetimes to pay back the loans?

Zombie Architecture

When the dead start to walk you’d better start building. the zombie safe house architecture competition looks awesome.

A zombie-proof house needs to be secure—not only structurally strong but also with limited openings on its perimeter that are all closable, lockable and impenetrable”. It needs to be simple and sustainable, capable of generating its own energy, food and water, and of managing its waste. And it needs to be “sacrificial—able to destroy itself and as many of the attacking zombies as possible while its inhabitants escape.

Elections farce

The actual share of voters nationally who are up for grabs is probably 3-5% in this election. The Obama and Romney campaigns are expected to spend on the order of $2B to sway this tiny share of the electorate.

an expensive circus for an outcome that is entirely irrelevant. no party, including the fringe ones, has any clue about our nonlinear world and their recipes stopped being effective decades ago.

winning isn’t everything

Freeman Dyson and William Press announced that they had discovered a previously unknown strategy for the game of prisoner’s dilemma which guarantees one player a better outcome than the other.

That’s a monumental surprise. Theorists have studied Prisoner’s Dilemma for decades, using it as a model for the emergence of co-operation in nature. This work has had a profound impact on disciplines such as economics, evolutionary biology and, of course, game theory itself. The new result will have impact in all these areas and more.

amazing contribution by freeman dyson (yes, he of the dyson spheres, not of the overpriced vacuum cleaners): tit for tat is not the only strategy in iterated prisoner’s dilemmas. i wonder what would have happened had we known this during the cold war.

Competition

competition might be a myth. seeing how ineptly most companies run their IT, it is a mystery how they can stay in business. so presumably they aren’t really exposed to competitive forces.